The ancient visitor would have found painting even more popular than sculpture in Rome’s temples and dwellings, porticoes and squares. He would have come upon many works of old masters there—Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Apelles, Protogenes, and others—as dear to the opulent Empire as the paintings of the Renaissance are to rich America; and he would have seen in greater abundance, through their better preservation, the products of Alexandrian and Roman schools. The art was old in Italy, where every wall craved ornament. Once even Roman nobles had practiced it; but the Hellenistic invasion had made painting Greek and servile, and at last Valerius Maximus marveled that Fabius Pictor should have stooped to paint murals in the Temple of Health.24 There were exceptions: toward the end of the Republic Arellius made a name for himself by hiring prostitutes to pose for his goddesses; in the time of Augustus a dumb aristocrat, Quintus Pedius, took up painting because his defect closed most professions to him; and Nero employed for the interior of his Golden House one Amulius, who “painted with the greatest gravity, always in his toga.”25 But such men were rari nantes in the crowd of Greeks who, at Rome and Pompeii and throughout the peninsula, made copies or variations of Greek paintings on Greek or Egyptian themes.
The art was practically limited to fresco and tempera. In fresco a freshly plastered wall was painted with water-moistened colors; in tempera the pigments were mixed with an adhesive sizing and laid upon a dry surface. Portrait painters sometimes employed an encaustic process in which the tints were fused in hot wax. Nero had his picture painted on a canvas 120 feet high—the first known use of this material. Painting, as we have seen, was applied to statues, temples, stage scenery, and great linen pictures intended for exhibition in triumphs or in the Forum; but its favored receptacle was the external or internal wall. The Romans seldom placed furniture against a wall or hung pictures there; they preferred to use the entire space for one painting, or for a group of related designs. In this way the mural became a part of the house, an integral item in the architectural design.
The caustic humor of Vesuvius has preserved for us some 3 500 frescoes-more paintings at Pompeii than can be found in all the rest of the classic world. Since Pompeii was a minor town we may imagine how many such murals brightened the homes and shrines of classic Italy. The best survivors have been removed to the Naples Museum; even there their lithe grace impresses us; but only the ancients knew them in the full depth of their color and in the architectural framework that gave each picture a function and a place. In the House of Vettii the murals have been left in situ: in a dining room Dionysus surprises the sleeping Ariadne; on the opposite wall Daedalus displays his wooden cow to Pasiphaë; at the farther end Hermes looks on calmly as Hephaestus fastens Ixion to the torturing wheel; and in another room a succession of humorous frescoes shows carefree Cupids parodying the industries of Pompeii, including the wine business of the Vettii. The bite of time has gnawed into these once brilliant surfaces, but enough remains to shock the visitor into modesty; the figures are almost perfectly drawn, and so colorful with the flesh of life that they can still make the blood stir lustily in living veins.
It is by reference to these Pompeian paintings that connoisseurs have tried to understand the nature, and classify the periods and styles, of pictorial art in ancient Italy. The method is precarious, for Pompeii was more Greek than Latin; but what remains of classic painting in Rome and its suburbs falls in tolerably well with the Pompeian development. In the First or Incrustation Style (second century B.C..) walls were often colored to resemble inlaid marble slabs (crustae), as in the “House of Sallust” at Pompeii. In the Second or Architectural Style (first century B.C.) the wall was painted to simulate a building or façade or colonnade. Often the columns were represented as seen from within, and open country was pictured between them; in this way the artist gave to a probably windowless room cool vistas of trees and flowers, fields and streams, peaceful or playful animals; the imprisoned dweller could fancy himself in Lucullus’ gardens by merely looking at the wall; he might fish or row or hunt, or indulge a fondness for birds without suffering their untimeliness; nature was taken into the house. The Third or Ornate Style (A.D. 1-50) employed architectural forms purely for ornament, and subordinated landscape to figures. In the Fourth or Intricate Style (A.D. 50-79) the artist let his fancy riot, invented fantastic structures and shapes, placed them in positions gaily scornful of gravity, piled gardens and columns, villas and pavilions, upon one another in modernistic disarray,26 and occasionally achieved the impressionistic effect of a picture supplemented by unconscious memory and suffused with light. In all these kindred styles architecture was handmaid and mistress to painting, served it and used it, and gave body to a tradition that reawoke, after sixteen centuries, in Nicolas Poussin.
It is a pity that the subjects of the major extant paintings so seldom venture beyond Greek myth. We tire of these same gods and satyrs, heroes and sinners—Zeus and Mars, Dionysus and Pan, Achilles and Odysseus, Iphigenia and Medea; though a like charge could be brought against the Renaissance. There are a few pictures of still life, and here and there a fuller, an innkeeper, or a butcher shines on Pompeian walls. Love often dominates the scene: a girl sits brooding over some secret longing not unrelated to the Eros who stands beside her; young men and women gambol amorously on the grass; Psyches and Cupids frolic as if the town had never known anything but love and wine. If we may judge from their representation in these murals, the women of Pompeii deserved to have life center about their comeliness. We see them engrossed in the game of “knucklebones,” or leaning gracefully over a lyre, or composing poetry with a meditative stylus at the lips; their faces are quiet with maturity, their forms are healthily full, their robes fall about them with Pheidian amplitude and rhythm, they walk like Helens conscious of their divinity. One of them performs a Bacchic dance, apparently in thin air; her right arm, hand, and foot are as lovely as anything in the history of painting. Some male characters must be included with these masterpieces: Theseus victor over the Minotaur, Hercules rescuing Deianira or adopting Telephus, Achilles angrily surrendering the reluctant Briseis; in this last picture every figure nears perfection and Pompeian painting is at its best. Humor is represented, too: a disheveled pedagogue stumbles forward on his staff; a jolly satyr shakes his shanks in sardonic revelry, a bald ribald Silenus is caught in a mood of musical ecstasy. Taverns and brothels came in for appropriate decoration, and no eager tourist need be told that Priapus still flaunts his precious powers on Pompeian walls. At the other end of the gamut, in the Villa Item, is a series of religious pictures, suggesting the use of the place for celebrating the Dionysian mysteries: in one fresco a little girl, palsied with piety, reads from an apparently sacred book; in another a procession of damsels advances, blowing pipes and bringing sacrifice; in a third a nude lady dances on tiptoe while a neophyte kneels exhausted by some ritualistic whipping.27 Finer than any of these is a mural found in the ruins of Stabiae, presaging Botticelli and called Spring: a woman walks slowly through a garden, gathering flowers; only her back is seen, and the graceful turning of her head; but seldom has any art conveyed so movingly the poetry of this simple theme.
The most powerful of all the pictures recovered from these ruins is the Medea found at Herculaneum, and preserved in the Naples Museum—a brooding woman, magnificently draped, meditating the murder of her children; apparently this is a copy of the painting for which Caesar paid the artist, Timomachus of Byzantium, forty talents ($ 144,000).27a
Few pictures of such quality have been found in Rome. But in the suburban villa of Livia at Prima Porta a supreme example was discovered of that landscape painting in which Italy so far excels Greece. The eye is lured as if across a court to a marble trellis, beyond which is a jungle of plants and flowers so accurately reproduced that botanists can now identify and catalogue them; every leaf is carefully drawn and colored; birds perch here and there as if for a moment, and insects creep amid the foliage. Only less masterly is the “Aldobrandini” Wedding found on the Esquiline in 1606, and enthusiastically studied by Rubens, Vandyke, and Goethe. Perhaps it is a copy of a Greek work; perhaps it is an original by a Roman Greek, or by a Roman; we can only say that these figures—the quiet and timid bride, the goddess who counsels her, the mother absorbed in preparations, the maidens waiting to play the lyre and sing—are all done with a delicacy and sensitivity that make this mural a distinguished relic of classic art.
Roman painting laid no claim to originality; Greek artists carried with them everywhere the same traditions and methods; and even the vague impressionism of these pictures may be offshoots of Alexandrian skills. But there is in them a fineness of line, and a richness of color, that explain why painters like Apelles and Protogenes were held in as high repute as sculptors like Polycleitus and Praxiteles. Sometimes the color is as full as if Giorgione had laid it on; sometimes the subtle gradations of light and shade suggest Rembrandt; sometimes a crude figure catches the ungainly realism of Van Gogh. Perspective here is often faulty, and hasty workmanship limps behind mature conception. But a fresh vitality redeems these faults, the rhythm of the drapery lures the eye, and the woodland scenes must have been a delight to dwellers in a crowded town. Our taste today is more restrained; we like to leave a wall its own significance, and have hesitated, till yesterday, to cover it with paint. But to the Italian a wall was a prison, seldom opening through a window upon the world; he wished to forget the barrier, and be deluded by art into some verdant peace. Perhaps he was right: better a pictured tree on a wall than a magic casement’s prospect of a thousand unkempt rooftops blaspheming the sky and festering in the sun.